Montreal Tech Watch

There’s an interesting post at nextmontreal on how the city can be an open source startup hub. It is an opinion piece written by Evan Prodromou, who is no stranger to open source ventures, with now identi.ca and previously wikitravel. Montreal does have other open source startups, but the post raises many questions though.

The choice of words is important. A hub is a central place where major events originate, where leaders originate, and where the most important initiatives begin and end, perhaps best illustrated by Hollywood for cinema and Nashville for the music industry. In terms of funding new work, gathering creatives from all over the country and the world, creating intense competition, fuelling dreams, nothing can compare to the power of Hollywood. It’s where movie projects begin and that’s where they are celebrated. If Montréal is to become an open source startup hub, it should attract the majority of open source developers, the stars as well as non-stars, it should have the headquarters of most open source companies such as sugarcrm or openx, it should have the biggest open source conferences and events, and it also should give birth to the most successful open source companies, in a consistent way. Most open source initiatives should also originate from Montréal.

What do we have currently? Three years ago, there were popular events such as Rococo Camp, or to a lesser extent BarCamps. It gathered lots of developers and also thought leaders, from Montréal and also from other cities. There were also regular codefests and similar events gathering developers believing in open source.

Now sadly, I have trouble finding an event that would focus on open source. There are of course events like WordPressMontreal, but they gather mostly bloggers and marketers interested on the business usage of WordPress, with no talks on the state of open source or its future. Open data events like WP-10 gets 15 or so attendees, while business events like StartupCampMontreal get 700 or so people. In three or two years, we have moved from discussions about the open source way and how to be open source to the applications of open source technologies, i.e. moving from open source as a state of mind to mentionning open source as merely a business advantage.

Three years ago, it was very easy to bump into an entrepreneur who’d want to take the idea of open source and hope to revolutionize with it the media industry, arts, or politics. Now, I meet every day more entrepreneurs hoping to build on the closed Apple stack than entrepreneurs knowing the difference between open source and Free Software. The bold idea of letting contributors shape collectively ideas isn’t there anymore, it’s merely one process in the UX designer tool box, amongst many others.

So without this “state of mind”, Montreal would never have a strong and resilient ecosystem, necessary before calling itself an open source startup hub. This state of mind pushes people to volunteer, organize and promote events celebrating open source code. It will spun a diversity of places dedicated to open source. It will encourage most local organizations to push innovative open source libraries.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the answer to Evan’s piece is no. There are interesting initiatives like MontrealOuvert, which hopes to have open data for the city of Montreal. There’s no reason we can’t have a similar organization like OpenMedia.ca in Montreal (currently based in Vancouver BC). Evan and Tikiwiki could co-organize a large OSCON-type conference in Montreal. Companies similar to OpenX or SugarCRM could be funded by investors. We can reach out to students and existing organizations like foulab to start new open source initiatives. What about a codefest or an open source weekend in late february or March? What about announcing new barcamps? If we have Montreal On Rails and Montreal Python, is there a way to have a monthly “Montreal open source showcase”?